storefront or slate and shingle

Via the Browser, here’s one prognostication for the coming year regarding “distributed content” that’s a very good and quick study.

Already the publishing houses of the internet scuttle writing and reporting to select social networks, where their articles are handily propagated and garner much greater exposure in those wilds, rather than on their own tamer, manicured turf: their home page. The prediction is that news organisations and other forums will shed their own web pages entirely and only exist in that stream of consciousness. Sometimes hosting one’s own content does seem a little vainglorious or ungainly and unrefined, but—and even for all the flash and circulation—I imagine that it is still a better route to maintain some sense of place and ownership and pride for what one has made.

iconodule

Celebrated on the first Sunday of the Great Lent (1 March, this year), the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy celebrates the restoration of icons, holy images, to the Church, and the victory of the iconodules—those who venerate images, the iconophiles over the iconoclasts who considered the practise idolatry.

The service that takes place in churches on that day has come to present the defeat of heretical thinking in general but the mass remembers a historic event that took place in March of 843 when the icons were returned to the Hagia Sophia. Recursively, an icon was created to illustrate this auspicious event. I had always believed that the iconoclasm was an internal matter and one could easily imagine disputes arising, as they continue to do, over the sacramental nature of holy objects—whether they help the faithful to focus their attention or are vain distractions, but it seems that the division arose and sides were taken due in part—at least, to mounting outside pressures: with the rapid expansion of Islam—who were strongly against any human or divine imagery of any kind, the Church began to reassess its position. Did these Muslims, who were making inroads on Byzantine territory and even threatening Constantinople itself, have God’s favour because they had roundly rejected graven images? As above, the debate—and often violently continues—within and without.

dnd or bread and board

Collectors’ Weekly profiles the passion of one Edoardo Flores, a labour ombudsman for the United Nations who traveled the world for three decades, and amassed quite a few usual and culturally-telling do-not-disturb doorhangers from the hotels where he has stayed. These souvenirs gave him a taste for travel ephemera and the stories that they tell—what locals think of the tourists—and has since gathered thousands, lovingly curated.

root, third and fifth

Courtesy of Nag-on-the-Lake, comes an interesting look at the choreography and vision of Oskar Schlemmer through his avante-garde production called the Triadisches (Triadic) Ballet, scored by Paul Hindemith, which premiered in Stuttgart in 1922 and toured Europe to spread the spirit and character of the Bauhaus design movement.  A certain Euclidian transformation takes place for these dancers in elaborate and bulky geometric costumes.  There is more to discover at the link, including a recreation (the original musical accompaniment lost to history but reconstructed) of a performance staged in 1970.

theo-fascism

Oh, God bless! There can be no words to mediate the horrors we’re capable of committing, still I’d much rather suffer the media-echo and those absolutely salivating, chomping at the bit to be vilified from all corners rather than violence that cannot be taken back.

Although business seems brisk lately, there has always been a strong industry behind avoiding insulting one group or another. Religion is there to help us wrestle with the big questions and will gladly tag us out once we’re spent until the next round and needs no defense or rescuing—indeed is admitting of our weaknesses, demands, doubts and even ridicule. What’s left—defenseless, indefensible and vulnerable—is ideology cloaked in faith and freedom, and that’s what exacts such atrocities from its adherents.

peak oil or race to the bottom

The last time that petrol prices were at this level was just after the so called Great Recession impacted the markets and caused an industry glut and gas was on the trajectory upward in June of 2009. This flashback index, which is just a point on the continuum that’s made all the more painful by knowing it’s neither a wholly good thing nor liking to be lasting, finds H and I fresh from our Roman holiday—Qaddafi was apparently visiting at the same time. 

Elsewhere US forces were withdrawing from a tumultuous Iraq, Michael Jackson passed away, France is in Sarkozy’s court, North Korea prepares for nuclear ballistics tests, civil war rages in Somali, too big to fail enters economic terminology, bird flu is spreading and swine flu becomes endemic and Russian aggression in Georgia continues with the establishment of a permanent military presence. Seeing the prices at the pump is not as jarring as seeing the gas station billboard conserved in that 1985 (the Iran-Iraq War and the OPEC price-war) Tears for Fears music video Everybody Wants to Rule the World—but conveys almost the same sense of apprehension. Whatever factors are behind this downward trend, nefarious, punitive or accidental, is no favour or respite, as current prices do not provide any incentive for diversification, even if there was already a little will and delicate momentum to improve, businesses, with transportation costs less of a consideration, can well afford to cast its tenterhooks further afield and stir up some cut-throat competition, and for consumers, once prices do rise again, it will be particularly punishing. What do you think? Will any good come of this?

two spirits, one body

Though I didn’t realise that there was any portrayal or awareness outside of Arthur Penn’s anti-establishment screen adaptation of Little Big Man, the special esteem afforded to members that did not fit into traditional gender roles that was not something hidden but rather respected and was an unsettling surprise for the early explorers and later anthropologists encountering Native American tribes.

Recognising and even valuing those whom had both female and male personality traits and sustained same-sex relationships was nearly a universal institution among groups in North America—which Europeans labeled derisively as berdache, from the French term referring to a male-prostitute or a sex-slave. Tribally, they had their own words to describe these individuals and assigned communal duties, including taking on the roles of singers, dancers, tailors, crafters, baby-naming authorities, fortune-tellers, and matchmakers, which were specially set aside for these experts. In some cultures, men and women would cross-dress to classify themselves as such—but it was not a requirement and no scarlet letter to identify themselves to others as butch or effeminate. In the 1990s, Indians eventually came to reject externally imposed terminologies and concepts like gay—and hetero-normative, which reflected the backward thinking that eclipsed aboriginal ways and which also got to give the definitive account—to bring Two-Spirit in as an overarching designation. I like Two-Spirit—simple and straightforward and not confusing like non-binary and does not sound politically frustrated.

foo-fighters or roadside attractions

During the last years of the war, Nazi scientists were working on a secretive underground construction programme in the catacombs of mines in the Lower Silesian region, code named Project Riese—Giant.

Although this massive project was presumably undertaken to house displaced administrative divisions along the Western front and as a logistical extension of Nazi-Germany’s deadly real and substantial rocketry programme, no one is entirely sure what was happening in these mine-shafts. Some believe, gleaned from various descriptions and accounts of forced-labourers, that a Wunderwaffe was being developed there. Die Glocke, the Bell, as the device was dubbed because of its shape, seemed to be a very mutable armament, the subject of much popular conjecture—and fearfully capable of anything or feasibly nothing at all.
Supposedly the housing was a containment field for a mysterious substance known as Xerum 525, speculated to be anything ranging from red mercury to anti-matter—and once activated, the device may have been an experimental fusion bomb, an anti-gravity propulsion engine, a TARDIS, or a sort of magic, quantum cauldron for looking into the future. “Foo-fighter” was the term that Allied airmen used for unidentified flying objects and other strange aerial phenomena. If die Glocke did exist, its ultimate fate is too unknown, some say it was an escape pod, some theorizing that it remains in South America and others believing that it’s mothballed in Area 51, with the occasional cameo-appearance, like in the 1965 space acorn incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.